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Chic & Aristofreeks, Le Freak Remixes EP: Who or what is Aristofreeks? Well, to quote directly from their SoundCloud profile, “Aristofreeks is the name of the funky beast that comprises DMC mixing championship finalist Max Martire and the internationally renowned musical chameleon Lenny Ibizarre.” If you’re questioning if these upstarts have got the goods to remix such a classic song, then you’ll be interested to learn that they’re contributing to a new single, “Everybody Get On Up,” by Next Step, a group consisting of former Chic singers Norma-Jean Wright, Luci Martin, Alfa Anderson and featuring Kathy Sledge of Sister Sledge. Hello, instant dance-floor credibility!

Various Artists, Woodstock – Music from the Original Soundtrack and More / Woodstock 2: Just in time to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the musical festival to end all music festivals – or, at the very least, the one to inspire more people than any other to claim they were there whether they actually were or not – both the original soundtrack (and more) from the original film and its sequel have been added to our digital catalog.

From 1977 through 1993, the Thompson Twins – who in their commercial heyday were, as those who lived through the ‘80s know quite well, composed of three individuals, none of whom were related – were one of the more successful of the so-called “new wave” bands, earning seven top-40 hits during the course of their career, three of them hitting the top 10 (“Hold Me Now,” “Lay Your Hands on Me,” and “King for a Day”).

In 1989, after releasing five albums on Arista Records, the band made the jump to Warner Brothers, recording another two albums,Big Trash and Queer, before evolving into a new musical entity called Babble, but after recording two albums in this guise (The Stone and Ether), Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie – the stalwarts between the two groups, not to mention husband and wife at the time– decided to leave Babble behind them.

With Big Trash and Queer having recently joined Rhino’s digital catalog, we caught up with Bailey by phone and asked him to reflect on those albums, the transition from Thompson Twins to Babble, his semi-retirement from the music industry for the better part of the last two decades, and what led him to finally begin the process of stepping back in, as he’s doing this summer as part of the line-up of the Retro Futura tour.

If you were to merely take a cursory glance at the track listing of the new Herbie Hancock compilation, The Warner Bros. Years (1969-1972), it’s possible that you could find yourself thinking, “The guy couldn’t manage more than 19 tracks in four years?”

Actually, the number’s even lower than that: if you took a slightly longer look at the track listing, you’d see that three of the inclusions are the single versions of album tracks, while two others are edits of songs released on promotional singles which have remained commercially unavailable until now. But there’s one very important thing that you’re not taking into account if you’re being in any way dismissive of this material: the three albums contained within this set – Fat Albert Rotunda (1969), Mwandishi (1971), and Crossings (1972) – are among the greatest piano-led jazz recordings on the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

This week’s Mono Monday release is a 1969 album from a certified blues master. Well, actually, we didn’t ask to see his certificate of mastery, but we respect Freddie King enough to know that he wouldn’t release an album entitled Freddie King is a Blues Master if he couldn’t back it up that kind of bold claim. Also, in case this piece happens to be your introduction to the album in question, allow us to assure you that we’ve heard it, and there’s definitely no case of false advertising in play.

By the time he released Blues Master, King – who died in 1976 at a far-too-young 42 years of age – already had a well-established history of describing his activities in his album titles. His debut LP was entitled Freddie King Sings, and in 1965 he offered up Freddie King Sings Again; between those two releases, he asked of potential buyers Let's Hide Away and Dance Away with Freddy King (1961), then hit the waves in 1963 with Freddie King Goes Surfin’.

In recent years, the sight of a porkpie hat has inspired most people to think of one word – Heisenberg – but prior to the premiere of Breaking Bad, it used to be the chapeau of choice for rude boys... and if you don’t know what a rude boy is, then, boy, do you need to run out and pick up our latest 180-gram vinyl releases!

First and foremost, we’d recommend The Best of 2-Tone, because it’s evident that you need a proper education in ska, and when it comes to a solid sampling of the genre, you need look no further than this set, which features material from The Beat (“The Tears of a Clown,” “Ranking Full Stop”), The Bodysnatchers (“Let’s Do Rock Steady”), Madness (“The Prince”), Rico (“Sea Cruise”), The Selecter (“The Selecter,” “On My Radio,” “Three Minute Hero,” “Missing Words”), The Special AKA (“Gangsters,” an edited version of “Nelson Mandela,” a live version of “Too Much Too Young,” and “The Boiler”), and The Specials (“A Message to You Rudy,” “Rat Race,” “Stereotype,” “Do Nothing,” and “Ghost Town”).

Flautist fans! We bet you are dying to get your hands on an Ian Anderson-autographed copy of Jethro Tull's A PASSION PLAY: AN EXTENDED PERFORMANCE, the original 1973 album and Chateau d' Herouville Sessions, remixed to 5.1 surround. Don't think about it, just enter to win already.

Yes, there have been ZZ Top greatest-hits collections in the past, and, yes, they’ve all been rather solid, but now the band is bringing you not only the baddest of their material but also the very baddest. Okay, so maybe the differentiation between the two is predominantly that one’s a single-disc compilation and the other’s a two-disc set. Either way, they’re both pretty darned bad…by which, of course, we mean that they rock pretty darned hard.

In the press release which accompanied the news of this release, Billy Gibbons – who, along with Dusty Hill and Frank Beard, founded the band in 1969 – observed from beneath his beard that he and his bandmates were “glad that material originally issued by three different labels over the course of all these years will now be housed under one ‘roof,’ to so speak,” calling it “kind of a big, bad family reunion on some level.” By that, of course, Gibbons means that, in addition to their tremendous back catalog on Warner Brothers, these collections also feature inclusions from their more recent albums on RCA and Universal.

Duran Duran, Rio: Do we really need to sell you on this album beyond listing off its trifecta of hit singles? Seriously, if the knowledge that you’re getting “Hungry Like the Wolf,” “Save a Prayer,” and the title track aren’t enough to make you want to pick up this vinyl reissue, we can’t help you.

Eddie Harris, Live at Newport: We’re only just a few days past the 44th anniversary of the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival, which makes this the perfect week to add this album to the digital catalog, since – as you probably already figured out where we were going with this – that’s when and where it was recorded. As funky as it is jazzy, it’s a performance that may have been a little too ahead-of-the-curve for some at the time, but listening to it now, it’s clear that what Harris was really doing was trying to set a new musical standard…and succeeding, we’d argue.

Maynard Ferguson, A Message from Newport / Newport Suite: Despite its title, Maynard’s Message was not, in fact, recorded in Newport but, rather, at a performance in New York. Nor, for that matter, was Newport Suite, although that particular album does have the advantage of the song “Newport” having been premiered at the 1959 festival. Given the two album titles, it’s perhaps no surprise that they’ve been paired together in the past, but if you’re on a limited budget, we’d definitely recommend the latter, which is arguably one of the best efforts ever delivered by the legendary trumpeter.